USCIRF Gets its Comeuppance From Modi Sarkar

Modi Sarkar gladdened the hearts of Hindu nationalists when it refused to give visas to a company of American sewage inspectors called USCIRF which wanted to come to Bharat to inspect the state of religious freedom in Modi’s Bharat. The USCIRF bared its fangs in 2002 when the BJP led by Atal Behari Vajpayee was in power. The opening paragraph of a news report featured on the front page of The Hindu dated 2nd October, 2002, titled “Designate India, Pakistan as countries of particular concern,” reads thus: “The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) has recommended that the US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, designate India, along with others, as ‘Countries of Particular Concern’ under the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998.” According to this news report, the USCIRF was reacting to ‘periodic violence’ against the religious minorities of the country, violence which has been on the increase because of the “rise in political influence of groups associated with the Sangh Parivar, a collection of Hindu extremist nationalist organizations that views non-Hindus as foreign to India and hence deserving of attack.”

This was a Freudian slip. “Hindu extremist nationalist organizations” is American verbose for RSS and significantly “nationalist” is pronounced in the same breath as “extremist”. It is a Freudian slip which exposed the open secret that America through the USCIRF and the Vatican were working in tandem to promote the cause of Jesus Christ. These were the exact words of Pope John Paul II when he addressed the United Nations General Assembly in 1995: …”we must ensure that extreme nationalism does not continue to give rise to new forms of the aberrations of totalitarianism.” The Vatican set the precedent of speaking of nationalism in the same breath as extremism.

Modi Sarkar’s crackdown on foreign funds to NGOs, the government’s crackdown on Greenpeace and Ford Foundation has obviously rattled the white Christian world and expectedly, America brandished the USCIRF on Bharat’s face. RSS, BJP and Narendra Modi will always be the Military Industrial Complex’s anti-Christ and the USCIRF is just one puny weapon against Hindu Bharat. In a replay of its 2002 report, the USCIRF in 2016 laments:

“We are deeply disappointed by the Indian government’s denial, in effect, of these visas. As a pluralistic, non-sectarian, and democratic state, and a close partner of the United States, India should have the confidence to allow our visit,” Robert P. George, Chairman of USCIRF, a bipartisan body, said.

“USCIRF will continue to pursue a visit to India, given the ongoing reports from religious communities, civil society groups, and NGOs that the conditions for religious freedom in India have been deteriorating since 2014,” Mr George said. The annual report of USCIRF documents and categorises countries based on their religious freedom record. In 2015, the report had criticised India and had named BJP and affiliated bodies.

“Incidents of religiously-motivated and communal violence reportedly have increased for three consecutive years. The states of Andhra Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Chattisgarh, Gujarat, Odisha, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, and Rajasthan tend to have the greatest number of religiously-motivated attacks and communal violence incidents. Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and religious leaders, including from the Muslim, Christian, and Sikh communities, attributed the initial increase to religiously-divisive campaigning in advance of the country’s 2014 general election. Since the election, religious minority communities have been subject to derogatory comments by politicians linked to the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and numerous violent attacks and forced conversions by Hindu nationalist groups, such as Rashtriya Swayam- sevak Sangh (RSS) and Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP),” the report had said. (link)

The U.S was understandably incensed. Modi’s Hindu Bharat was refusing to genuflect before all things American and rejection was bitter medicine. After all, the Italian Roman Catholic Sonia Gandhi led UPA had taken the unprecedented step of inviting the USCIRF to visit Gujarat and Orissa to write officious reports on religious freedom. The Vatican’s Cardinal Jean-Louis Pierre Tauran was issued a visa to come to Mumbai for an inter-religious dialogue (whatever that means) in June 2009. The Gujarati padre Cedric Prakash was so emboldened by Sonia gandhi’s ascendance in Bharatiya politics that he dared to make the foolish claim that Narendra Modi must win the approval of western nations (read US) to become Prime Minister of Bharat, and that the USCIRF visit has been welcomed by Gujaratis in America who want the US State Department to remove Modi from their anti-Christ list and give him a visa to the US!

To be told now by Modi Sarkar that they were not welcome brought the USCIRF sand castle down with a whine.

In 2002 when I read the USCIRF report my first impulse was to consign it to the trash can. And I would have, had this been the ranting of some American Southern Baptist group or some disgruntled Christian or Marxist NGO in one of their periodic diatribes against the RSS and the rising religious and political consciousness of the Hindus of this country; or the ranting of the Generic Church funded anti-Hindu human rights industry.

But this was the ranting of a statutory body of the US government, a Commission that was constituted by law, a Commission (which is however allegedly non-governmental), whose members work closely with the American State Department. The Commission is headed by the Ambassador-at Large and he is the Special Adviser to the US President and to the US Secretary of State on International Religious Freedom. And so, the very least that a native of a developing third world nation, whose country has been stood in the dock by this “damning indictment” can do, when faced by the impertinence of foreign busybodies, is to respond to this nonsense with a modicum of seriousness.

The USCIRF Hit-list

In the first three years of its existence, from 1998 to 2001, the entire focus of the Commission was on China, Vietnam, Laos, Sudan and Burma. And these countries continue to remain on the hit list of this Commission not only because these countries are ruled either by Communist governments or by the military junta as in the case of Burma, but more interestingly, these countries have a marked antipathy towards Christianity and Christian missionaries. Contrary to the pious statements of this Commission that it is concerned about the lack of freedom of religion in these countries, and that its heart bleeds for the Buddhists and the Falun Gong, it is the refusal to allow Christian missionaries to operate in these countries that has incurred the wrath of this Commission. The list then expands to include Saudi Arabia, Turkmenistan, and now Pakistan and Bharat. Please note there is a deafening silence on the Good Taliban/Bad Taliban regime in Afghanistan in 1998, despite strong protests from women’s groups in the USA about the Taliban’s treatment of women in Afghanistan. Of course, this silence has nothing to do with the fact that major American oil and gas companies were talking to the Taliban in the hope that the terrorists would agree to let them build pipelines across Afghanistan to transport oil and gas from the Central Asian republics. The alternative was Iran, but then Iran would have laughed the Americans out of town. So that was ruled out. The US needed Afghanistan and the Taliban came as a package deal.

The USCIRF and its rationale

The USCIRF was constituted in 1998 because the US had no international agenda at that time to project its superpower status. The WTO had become a reality, the Taliban were around, but the USA needed pipelines across Afghanistan more than it wanted freedom of religion from the Taliban. The Soviet Union had disappeared, the people of Iraq were being subjected to slow and unexciting genocide by US enforced and UN sanctioned total economic blockade and the US had no excitement that real cloak and dagger stuff can give to its national life. Because 9/11 was still three years down the line and the invasion and occupation of Iraq as American pastime entertainment was still in the future, America was spoiling for a fight and so it discovered International Religious Freedom. The US passed the International Religious Freedom Act in 1998 and soon after it also constituted the Commission for IRF by law. The rationale for the Act is best expressed by the Act itself – SEC. 2. FINDINGS; POLICY.

(a) FINDINGS – Congress makes the following findings:

(1) The right to freedom of religion undergirds the very origin and existence of the United States. Many of our Nation’s founders fled religious persecution abroad, cherishing in their hearts and minds the ideal of religious freedom. They established in law, as a fundamental right and as a pillar of our Nation, the right to freedom of religion. From its birth to this day, the United States has prized this legacy of religious freedom and honoured this heritage by standing for religious freedom and offering refuge to those suffering religious persecution.

I will come to this hilarious self-description of “pillar of our nation” in just a while, but it will be interesting to see what triggered this pious decision to monitor international religious freedom in the rest of the world. There are two major causes for the US’ sudden love for religious freedom.

First – Religion was coming back in a big way in the former Soviet Union and in Russia, Belarus, and the Ukraine, in Georgia and Armenia the Church was once again becoming a force and an influence to contend with. While all these republics were Christian, none of them acknowledge the supremacy of the Vatican. Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, and Serbia are Eastern Orthodox while in Armenia, the Armenian Apostolic Church is in communion with Eastern Orthodox Church and Georgia too while Catholic, was not Roman Catholic. They all had their own national churches and the Hierarchy too was national. These republics refused to allow the Vatican, American and European churches, Catholic and Protestant, to open shop in their territories. Indeed, the climate was distinctly hostile to the expansionist designs of the Vatican and the American and European churches in the vulnerable soil of these fledgling nation-states. This of course incensed the US and the Vatican.

Second – rapidly declining numbers of their flock in the West had the Vatican and the American and European churches looking for new territories to conquer, new peoples to evangelise and convert. They all turned their attention on Asia. On Easter’s eve in 1996, Pope John Paul II led 20,000 Roman Catholics in an Easter vigil at St. Peter’s basilica. In his homily John Paul II spoke specifically of Asia after having previously denounced discrimination against Catholics in Vietnam and China. He spoke of ‘the great desire of Christ and the Church to meet the populations and cultures of that immense continent, rich in history and noble traditions. You constitute in a certain way the answer of nations to the new evangelization,’ he said.

The Vatican and Asia

The Vatican had decided that in the third millennium the Church would plant the cross in Asia and harvest the souls of the non-Christian and non-Muslim peoples of Asia – the Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs and peoples of other non-proselytizing faiths that originated in Bharat. To this end, a Special Assembly of the Synod of Bishops for Asia was held in April/May of 1998 in the Vatican.

The Vietnamese government, as early as in January 1998 had refused permission to its Bishops to attend the Synod. By April, China too had refused permission to the Bishops in China and Taiwan to attend the Synod. On May 14th, a Mass in Saint Peter’s basilica brought to a close the work of the Special Assembly for Asia of the Synod of Bishops. According to ‘Fides’ the Vatican news agency, “At the end of his homily, the Holy Father voiced his intention to visit Asia in the near future to present the post-synodal exhortation. This led to excited discussion among the Synod Fathers about possible places for the visit. In the end they suggested a journey with three laps: Bombay, Manila, Hong Kong. Others suggested Jerusalem, Beijing, Calcutta, Ho Chi Minh city, Tokyo or Baghdad.”

The intention of the Vatican was clear. It intended for the Pope to make a high profile visit to deliver the post-synodal exhortation in one of the Asian countries – China, Vietnam, Bharat or Japan – countries where the majority of the population is non-Christian – Hindus or Buddhists. China of course and Vietnam too, promptly refused to allow the Pope to come visiting them. In Bharat too there was growing awareness and unease about the intentions of the churches of the world to aggressively convert the Hindus, Buddhists and Sikhs to the Christian religion and the Hindus were organizing themselves not only to expose the intentions of the Vatican and the American and European churches, but also to resist any and all attempts at religious conversion.

The Duplicity of the Vatican and the US

One must see the US’ sudden love for international religious freedom against this background – of Asia’s growing hostility to Western trade war through globalization and Christian missionary activities, both of which historically have always acted in tandem. Pope John Paul II succeeded to the Papacy precisely because he was Polish and Poland was the weakest link in the Soviet bloc – Roman Catholics like the people of Croatia and not Eastern Orthodox like Serbia or Russia. The Polish Pope John Paul II succeeded to the Papacy because his mandate was clear – to exert pressure on the weakest link – on Poland and bring about the collapse of communism and consequently the Soviet Union.

The calculation being when communism fails, the west can step in with its IMF and the World bank and capitalism and free market, and when the Soviet Union disappeared it would also signal the end of the already weakened and debilitated Eastern Orthodox Church and the Vatican can step in to open shop. A dream the West and the Vatican had nurtured and pursued unceasingly for more than five decades. They succeeded only partially. Communism failed, the Soviet Union disintegrated, but the Eastern Orthodox Church rose like the phoenix and reacted ferociously to the Vatican and other western churches attempting to open their industry in these territories.

One must also see the antipathy of the USA, the West and the Vatican to China, Vietnam, and Serbia in this context. While the USA passed the International Religious Freedom Act in 1998, the seeds of the Act were sown cleverly in 1995 itself, to coincide with the creation of the WTO, when Pope John Paul II was invited to address the UN General Assembly on 5 October 1995, to mark the 50th year of the UN. And he devoted his entire talk to the rights of people to freedom, to human rights, to the rights of nations to come into being and to exist (a call for enabling the fructifying of movements for self-determination, a forewarning of the creation of Croatia, East Timor).

It is one of the cleverest, most cunning speeches ever made. Every sentence should be read to mean that he is talking only of Christian interests, Christian political and religious rights. Wherever he appeals for diversity, he is appealing to those nations and peoples who are non-Christian to allow the Christian faith with its missionary agenda, to exist, to grow. And for the first time, the Church, and immediately thereafter American think tanks, begin to make a distinction between ‘patriotism’ which is in their view, positive, and ‘nationalism’ which in their view is negative, because it is synonymous with protectionism and shuts its doors on the face of religious and economic invaders.

One of the reasons cited by the US for constituting the USCIRF is: “Though not confined to a particular region or regime, religious persecution is often particularly widespread, systematic, and heinous under totalitarian governments and in countries with militant, politicized religious majorities.”

This is an accurate paraphrase of the Pope’s UNGA address in 1995 where he invents his own definition of nationalism and patriotism thus: “We need to clarify the essential difference between an unhealthy form of nationalism, which teaches contempt for other nations or cultures, and patriotism, which is a proper love of one’s country. True patriotism never seeks to advance the well-being of one’s own nation at the expense of others. For in the end, this would harm one’s own nation as well. Doing wrong damages both aggressor and victim. Nationalism, in its most radical form, is thus the antithesis of true patriotism, and today we must ensure that extreme nationalism does not continue to give rise to new forms of the aberrations of totalitarianism.”

USCIRF’s hostile intent in 2002 when the BJP was in power in Delhi and its hostile intent now in 2016, when the BJP is in power again in Delhi must be seen as the Generic Church’s fear and antipathy for nationalism – in this case Hindu nationalism.

Patriotism, Nationalism and all that Crap

Now let us apply the Pope’s yardstick of ‘true patriotism’ and ‘extreme nationalism’ to religion, to Christianity and the Church specifically. If the Pope were indeed sincere about his call for allowing diversity to exist, about his devout respect for all cultures and traditions, he will acknowledge that all cultural values and traditions derive from the religion and faith of the people.

The US, USCIRF and the Generic Church must explain the basis for religious conversion and the determination of the Vatican to convert all peoples of the world to the Christian faith, to the Catholic faith to be exact. Will this allow for diversity, will this express respect for other cultures and traditions? Is this not an agenda for homogenization and does this not violate the principle of the right to existence of other religions and faiths? Has the Pope not learnt anything from the destruction and the total annihilation of the religions of the Native Americans and the Africans by the Church?

The west, of course, is rediscovering ‘nationalism’ and is now beginning to understand the need for protectionism when globalization opened the borders of their countries to immigration. Now they realise how important it is to preserve their white Christian culture and way of life from the onslaught of third world natives and Muslim migrants. So while the USA and the West want Asians to open their borders to their capital and goods, and throw open the doors of our societies and homes to Christian missionaries, they frown upon religious and economic nationalism a.k.a. protectionism. They however want to clamp down on immigration, shut their borders to Asians, Africans and Syrian and other Middle-east Muslim refugees to rediscover what it is to be American, British, German and French.

“Our respect for the culture of others is therefore rooted in our respect for each community’s attempt to answer the question of human life. And here we can see how important it is to safeguard the fundamental right to freedom of religion and freedom of conscience, as the cornerstones of the structure of human rights and the foundation of every truly free society. No one is permitted to suppress those rights by using coercive power to impose an answer to the mystery of man.”

The irony of it all! The last line can be understood better if we know that the Vatican believes that the catholic faith alone is the repository of all Truth and it alone has the answer to the mystery of man. So when the Pope talks of coercive power and the use of coercive power to impose an answer, he is referring to regimes and governments which have refused the Vatican and Christianity even a toe-hold in their countries – China, Vietnam, Japan, Burma (Myanmar), and of course the Asian Islamic nations of Malaysia and Indonesia where to proselytize and distribute Christian propaganda material is a crime. What the Pope is in fact demanding is the Christian right to propagate, evangelise and carry out individual and mass conversions in Asian countries with very large non-Christian populations.

The Deep Pocket of Human Rights

The seeds for an intrusive and aggressive foreign policy eroding national sovereignty were sown as early as in the late 1980s and in the 1990s decade with the USA, the West, the Vatican and the European churches, which collectively I label the Generic Church, acting in tandem. Concrete shape for renewed aggression by the USA against the nations of Asia is given through the inequitable WTO and the designing of the deep pocket called ‘human rights.’ It is a pocket deep enough to yield several agendas demanding unilateral or multilateral interference into domestic national affairs. Human rights can accommodate right to freedom of conscience, freedom of religion, women’s rights, children’s rights, rights of labour, right to self-determination, right to….the list can be made as endless as the US wants.

But the striking absence of right to freedom from racial discrimination and the right to participatory democracy has not been noticed it would seem. The US is yet to begin the process of participatory democracy. The highest offices of this land of the brave and the home of the free are reserved for the white/Christian (Protestant)/male [President Barack Obama who bucked the White House trend is half white and half African, half Christian and half Muslim]. As long as women, American Indian Hindus, African-American Christians and Muslims, Native Americans and Jews do not get elected to the White House, the USCIRF should deny itself the luxury of pointing fingers at Bharat. By this single act of commission alone, the US is guilty of several counts of religious and racial intolerance, undemocratic, and violator of all freedoms.

The US owes us an explanation now. Is the USCIRF empowered to monitor religious freedom only in the rest of the world or is it empowered to monitor systemic denial of religious rights within the USA too? Because there are enough documents to prove denial of the right to practice the rituals of their faith by Native American students in some American universities. And the Hinduphobic attitudes prevalent in America were revealed by the booing and bigotry that occurred when Hindu opening prayers were offered in the U.S. Congress in 2000, or the way mainstream papers like Washington Post often give space to Hindu-bashers.

The US and USCIRF also owe the world an explanation on their silence and polite looking the other way when the Taliban incarcerated the women and children of Afghanistan in their homes. Now is the time to deal with the “pillar of our nation” joke. All of you, who are not averse to waging this intellectual war against our adversaries, must read without fail two books – “A Little Matter of Genocide – Holocaust and Denial in the Americas: 1492 to the Present” by Ward Churchill and “American Holocaust – The Conquest of the New World” by David E. Stannard. Once you have read these two books, it is difficult to listen to or read anything the Pope or the USA is saying about freedom and human rights and democracy and pluralism without rolling on the ground in laughter.

“Religious freedom – the pillar of our nation”

What was that again? “The right to freedom of religion undergirds the very origin and existence of the United States. Many of our Nation’s founders fled religious persecution abroad, cherishing in their hearts and minds the ideal of religious freedom. They established in law, as a fundamental right and as a pillar of our Nation, the right to freedom of religion.”

Now let us see what these noble nation’s founders, ‘who fled religious persecution abroad,’ did to the Native Americans in the name of the Church and Christianity, in the name of religion. There is an encyclical by the Pope in the 15th century severely condemning the genocide of Native Americans. The Pope says that as long as these barbaric natives are fit to receive the message of Christ, their lives should be spared and should be elevated into the service of Christ.

From then on begins the savage christianising of the Native Americans. They are driven like so much cattle into Christian missions and there they are put to hard labour by the priests who think hard labour is good for the soul of Native Americans. They thought the same thing about the Africans whom they transported into North America later. Hard labour is always good for the non-white, non-Christian peoples of the world, particularly if the labour is for furthering the trade and economy of white Christian colonising nations.

In the words of Ward Churchill: “In actuality, the missions were death-mills in which Indians, often delivered en masse by the military, were allotted an average of seven feet by two feet of living space in what one observer described as ‘specially constructed cattle pens’. Although forced to perform arduous agricultural labour by the priests from morning to night, six days a week, the captives were provided no more than 1400 calories per day in low nutrient foods, with missions like San Antonio and San Miguel supplying as little as 715 calories per day.”

Probably most remarkable in this regard is Fray Junipero Serra, a Franciscan friar in charge of the northern California mission complex during its peak period, and a man whose personal brutality was noteworthy even by those standards (he appears to have delighted in the direct torture of victims, had to be restrained from hanging Indians in lots, a la Columbus, and is quoted as asserting that the entire race of Indians should be put to the knife).

Proposed for canonization as a saint by the Catholic Church, Serra’s visage, forty feet tall, today peers serenely down upon motorists driving south from San Francisco along Highway 101 from its vantage point on a prominent bluff. Another statue of Serra, a much smaller bronze which has stood for decades before San Francisco’s city hall, is being moved to a park.

Missionary Junipero Serra

Protests against sainthood for Juniperro Serra

Officials denied requests from local Native Americans that it be placed in storage, out of public view, however, offering the compromise of affixing a new plaque to address native concerns about the incipient saint’s legacy. (Hindus of Bharat and Jews of the world please note, ‘Mother’ Teresa and ‘Hitler’s Pope’ are both all set to be canonized as the new saints of the twentieth century in the Catholic pantheon, a gesture of gratitude for services rendered in the cause of furthering the Catholic Church in difficult times and in difficult climes). Church lobbyists however have undermined even that paltry gesture, preventing the inclusion of wording which might have revealed something of the true nature of the mass murder and cultural demolition over which Serra presided. Both man and mission, the Vatican insisted, were devoted to ‘‘mercy and compassion.”

In passing this Act on International Religious Freedom, the US is basing its case on the noble founders of the nation, on ‘the pillars of our nation’ – a nation that was built on the blood and sweat of genocide and slavery – both of which were practiced in the name of the Christian faith!!

What is right for you, is right for me

The US has set several precedents post September 11 – precedents worthy of emulation: The right to revenge, the right to pre-emptive strikes when faced with threats to national security, the right to demonstrative nationalism/protectionism. The USCIRF must ask itself why other religious minorities in Bharat, the Parsis, the Sikhs, the Buddhists and Jains never face the problems that Christians and Muslims in Bharat face at the hands of ‘Hindu extremists’? Why did the US carpet bomb Iraq and Afghanistan?

National security is threatened not only when our borders are threatened by foreign invaders in conventional war, but when our homes, communities and societies are threatened by religious invaders and terrorists. Christian missionaries and Islamic terrorists threaten Hindus and Hindu society. The right to self-defence is as much the prerogative of Hindus as it is of the US. So USCIRF or cannot preach to Bharat what America has never practiced.

As for their litany about rising Hindu extremism/nationalism threatening the secular, pluralistic, democratic fibre of the country, and all that, the State of Bharat is democratic and secular. The nation of Bharat is not. The nation of Bharat, like most nations of the world, is religious. And the rich diversity which is inherent in Hindu worldview, has been a living tradition for over two thousand years, when the first Christian and Muslim missionaries/traders/invaders begin to appear in our country, not because of the USCIRF or the UN or the Constitution of Bharat or the Human rights industry, but because this nation is a timeless civilization.

It has existed for centuries because the nation was Hindu. The Hindu thought is assimilatory, not exclusivist like the Abrahamic faiths. And it is this nation which is being threatened by the missionary activities of Christian fundamentalists and the secessionist activities of Islamic fundamentalists. The Hindus have survived 600 years of Muslim barbarism, 200 years of savage colonialism. We survived violent partition in 1947, and we are living with the twin monsters of ascendant jihadi Islam and extremist evangelical church – both monsters which were fed and fattened by Sonia Gandhi and her foreign masters.

Hindus have the right to exist, the right to protect their faith, the right to territory, the right to defend their women and children, the right to their unique worldview powered by Dharma, right to self defence and the right to pre-emptive strikes against their aggressors.

Closing Word

Readers are invited to visit www.vigilonline.com to read the path-breaking book NGOs, Activists and Foreign Funds: Anti-nation Industry which is a veritable who is who (polite for Rogue’s Gallery) of all anti-Bharat forces which come in different packages, with different names, in different contexts. The PDF version of the book is here:

The USCIRF held a special meeting on the Gujarat riots and all the usual suspects were wined and dined by America to provide grist for its anti-Hindu mill; Appendices 7 and 8 deal with the USCIRF. Incidentally, in the chapter “Singing for their Supper” readers will meet the original Didi, Gandhian Nirmala Deshpande who too was wined and dined by the US State Department.

Indian Activist takes Bush to task: David Scafenberg, Sentinel Staff Writer Excerpt from India Abroad (September 5, 2003): ‘Gandhian Nirmala Deshpande pulls no punches at meetings with administration officials – complains US reaction to Gujarat riots was not strong enough. Deshpande, 74, pointed to the lack of a strong reaction from US Govt. to the sectarian carnage in Gujarat, which she said was state sponsored. She lamented the victims had not seen justice either through the police or judicial systems. At the State Dept., Deshpande—known for her campaigns covering thousands of miles with the likes of freedom fighter Vinoba Bhave—met with Diana Barnes, Foreign Affairs Officer, Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor. At the US Commission on International Religious Freedom, she met with Patricia Carley, a senior policy analyst. She met with staffers of the hierarchy of the Congressional Caucus on India and Indian-Americans, addressed a community meeting at University of Maryland and interacted with the media. She said part of her trip would be to convince non-resident Indians and the Indian-American community not to contribute to the extremist groups. ‘We would like to make our friends aware of the reality and those who subscribe to these views that if you really love India, you should not do anything that would harm India. What these people are doing in Gujarat and trying to do in other states will harm India in a very big way.’

Her trip is being sponsored by NRIs for Secular and Harmonious India. In Washington, she was accompanied to the meetings by John Prabhudoss, Executive Director, Policy Institute for Religion and State, and Kaleem Kawaja, coordinator, NRIs for a Secular and Harmonious India. Indians who depose before the US State Department or before the USCIRF are anti-national, period. They squeal against their own countrymen, they express to a foreign Government their distrust of their country’s democratic institutions, they abuse their country’s police and armed forces, and they wail, ‘Indian democracy is in peril, come and save us.’ And if you are Arundhati Roy, you will add, ‘Me slave, you king’, for better effect. Some of these anti-national Bharatiya informers actually think it is an honour to be summoned to appear before the US Government to squeal against their country. Professor Sumit Ganguly, University of Texas, who also passes himself off as ‘expat journalist’ has appeared more than once before the USCIRF and his opening sentence at one such appearance in September 2000 was, ‘I consider it an honour and a privilege to be asked to testify before this Commission today.’ Now, this kind of slavish deference must have been music to American ears and they summoned the good and willing professor again in 2002.

The USCIRF held a special hearing on ‘Communal violence in Gujarat, India and the US response’ and those that were summoned to depose and those that appeared obediently before their masters on June 10, 2002 were Teesta Setalvad, Professor Kamal Mitra Chenoy, Professor Sumit Ganguly and Father Cedric Prakash. The URL of the proceedings of this hearing is presented to readers in Appendix 7 and is a must-read for the sheer antination, anti-Hindu intent not only of the Bharatiyas who deposed before an alien Government but for the anti-Bharat, anti-Hindu intent of the USCIRF itself. The comments made by the Commissioners about Bharat are an unmitigated piece of impertinence. Didi Deshpande, let us not forget, deposed before the US Government in September 2003. Neither the USCIRF nor the US State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor ever felt compelled to hold a hearing on the genocide of the Hindus of Kashmir or the ongoing violence and acts of terror by Christian terrorists in the North-East and Muslim terrorists across Bharat. Readers will note that these anti-national Indian worthies while auditing their country and its democratic institutions before the Americans also shed a few obligatory and insincere tears for the Hindus of Bangladesh! Not a tear for the Hindus at home – those that were killed and terrorised to flee from the state of Jammu and Kashmir, for the Hindu women and children killed in the Sabarmati Express in Godhra or for the Hindu victims of the Mumbai blasts and riots.